Posted on 07/06/2015 4:57:49 AM PDT by thackney
An oil-sales deal between Iraq and the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government is close to collapse about six months after it was signed, undermining the country’s unity as it struggles to fight Islamic State and contain an escalating financial crisis.
Months of acrimony between Baghdad and Erbil, the KRG’s capital, came to a head in June, when the Kurdish side reduced the amount of oil it sold through Iraq’s state-owned Oil Marketing Company, known as SOMO, and began ramping up its independent sales of oil through the Turkish port at Ceyhan.
The sales undercut an agreement struck in December that gave Iraq’s central government access to revenue from Kurdish oil, which accounts for about 15% of the 3.8 million barrels the country pumps each day on average. In exchange, the Kurds were to get 17% of federal expenditure—an amount KRG officials say hasn’t materialized.
“The oil deal between Baghdad and KRG has reached a deadlock,” said Kawa Mohammed, a Kurdish member of the Oil and Energy Committee in the Iraqi parliament. The accord “was built on uncertain foundation, very weak foundations, with a lack of trust on both sides.”
If the deal does collapse, it could rupture the fragile unity that Iraq relies on to fight Islamic State, which took over more than a quarter of the country in a startling blitz last summer. The KRG’s economy is facing a fiscal crunch that threatens its ability to support the Kurdish fighters who have taken a leading role in combating the extremist insurgency.
A failed deal would also thwart one of the signature achievements of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, nearly a year into a premiership that many Iraqi and foreign policy makers had hoped would usher in a new era of Iraqi unity to confront Islamic State.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
The Kurds owe Iraq nothing but extermination. It’s time for the Kurds to take their own country. If they take some Syrian and Turkish territory, so much the better.
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